Category: General Stuff

It’s been admittedly a very long while since my last post. I’ve been on somewhat of a hiatus from blogging and designing since voluntarily leaving my Sr. IxD position at Cisco a month ago (within the Voice Technology Group). Since then I’ve been exploring other options affording greater personal creative potential and strategic design innovation. In the meantime I’ve reunited with my friend and mentor Andrei Herasimchuk at Involution Studios on a short yet very exciting contract…who knows where it might lead :-) In addition, I’m providing ad-hoc UI consulting guidance for friends in the Bay Area and continuing to teach part-time at SJSU this fall. It’s an interesting time personally and professionally for me at this point in my career, having spent the last 7 years working at a variety of companies, large and small! No doubt, working in Silicon Valley has been incredibly beneficial on many levels, not the least of which the great multitude of options without having to relocate!

During my time off, I’ve been pondering what issues specifically to continue writing about, that continue and extend the general theme of “Ghost in the Pixel”. Here’s a tentative list of upcoming topics. Stay tuned…

* Lessons from corporate design

* Challenges of establishing a new design initiative

* Dark truths of designing: power, control, ego, and politics

* Preparing for your next job interview: what to really ask!

* In defense of creative talent…yes it still matters!

* Reviews of some new UI’s: Cuil, Chrome, Picasa, Firefox 3, etc.

A brief notice to all that my article “Experiential Aesthetics: A Framework for Beautiful Experience” has been published in the latest issue (No. 5, Sept/Oct) of ACM Interactions here: http://interactions.acm.org/content/XV/5.php

This article represents a concise summary of many of the issues concerning aesthetics that I’ve previously written about on this blog. Hope you enjoy it!

Recently I ran into a former colleague from Oracle while meeting with the Cisco WebEx design team, an informal meet-n-greet session to share and learn about our different projects. After I presented some rather visually bold next-generation UI concepts, she asked me aside who did the compelling visuals. I casually indicated that I did, which prompted a reply of surprise: “Really! I thought you were a true interaction designer, doing only flows, wireframes, diagrams, you know that sort of thing.” To which I responded vaguely, yes well I’m a hybrid I guess, etc…

Yet I knew what she meant really, and I must admit that I’ve always found that somewhat annoying. It’s not her fault of course, but there is a general misperception that interaction designers don’t/can’t/won’t do “beautiful” designs, which are believed to be the province solely of “visual designers”. I don’t want to get into the sources and catalysts for this misguided belief here. (I suspect a slushy cocktail mix of poor HR job descriptions, lots of varying college courses, CHI, Jakob Nielsen, amateur web designers, AIGA’s early attempts at “experience design”, IA vs IxD territoriality, etc.) And I’ve previously stated at length on this blog the value of beauty and aesthetics and why beauty matters for IxD professionals, so I’ll avoid jumping onto that soapbox again ;-)

But my friend’s off-hand comment does make me pause about the broader issue of what it means to be a “true” interaction designer.

To be sure, this is not about a holy war over definitions about “interaction design” vs. “interface design” vs. “experience design”. Ugh! That’s been done ad nauseum elsewhere and just tires me out. No, what’s more crucial is a fundamental existential question, not an epistemological issue, of what it means to BE an interaction designer. It’s not about definition but about action and essence, the act of living and embodying the values of an IxD professional and expressing them in your work and life.

In my personal view (shaped by my own diverse work and academic circumstances) a “true” interaction designer:

– Believes in the human experience and seeks to enrich, enliven, enable the ultimate and highest quality of that experience, however that may manifest: products, interfaces, services, processes, etc.

– Is a champion of aesthetic value: visual, behavioral, sensual, etc. If you don’t give a damn about this (or unwilling to even attempt this), then you’re not a designer (interaction or otherwise), plain and simple. Sorry.

– Leads with a design process, but not beholden to it; willing to try new approaches to discover insights to old problems. Understands that innovation comes from diverse (and often unexpected) sources and starting points. I remember a brainstorm at Involution where the main UI concept came from the client’s CFO of all people!

– Does typical process artifacts like diagrams, flows, wireframes, site maps, system models, but with an eye towards how they shape the screens/widgets/components/behaviors (seeing both forest and trees, and the leaves!). Also is willing to skip ahead or jump back if needed…

– Sketches, draws, visualizes, iterates, prototypes, over and over again, to get better resolution of solutions for well-defined problems. The “spec” does not drive the designing no matter how hard the engineers or product managers throw a tantrum. Designing is a humanistic act of creativity, not rote mechanical documentation. That comes later.

– Takes pride in the craft of making a superb experience, always seeking to make it insanely better but knowing it will never be perfect. It’s not a Sisyphian task (rolling the boulder up a hill for eternity) but more of a zen thing.

– Leverages research (of users, of technology, of business) where appropriate to guide decision-making as needed but again, not beholden to it.

In sum, my view of a “true” interaction designer is really an informed visionary–embodying a perhaps mythical amalgam of talent, ingenuity, knowledge, craft, strategic thinking, trendsetting, and a ferocious will of spirit to command and deliver brilliant solutions.

Holding to that standard, I have a very long way to go! And frankly, so do many others ;-) But that’s ok. That’s what makes being an interaction designer an incredible lifelong journey. You gotta love it… or leave it!

Below is based upon a reply I made to the ixda list re: design school frameworks…

Two personal anecdotes from design school:

1) My first graphic design class, I remember trying to get the hang of compositional space and laying out letters and image with the grid, etc. And I was trying too hard to be artsy. Prof came over, moved the elements around trying different arrangements (this is all paper pieces with hand-drawn letters, btw). I was blown away. I asked her what was she thinking about as she was organizing elements. And she walked me through a “framework” of person/space/word/image (i forget the actual words, but similar) which I found fascinating…That there’s a basic framework that guided her design actions in an intuitive manner because it had become her habit and evolved with her many years of experience, operating sub-consciously.

At that moment I realized that there is something specific and capable of being articulated that really separated communicative design from expressive art, which I found very powerful.

2) Dick Buchanan’s graduate design seminar, he wrote out the steps of a typical UCD process on the whiteboard, going on about the major steps, etc. When he concluded, I raised my hand and asked, “So if someone just walked in right now and memorized and did those steps, is that person then a designer?” And Dick just smiled sneakily, hinting something about the personal and the “noumenal”… hmmm!

I share these to show that designing actually balances both “frameworks” and “ingenuity” or “talent” (for lack of a better word) in a kind of back-and-forth dialogue, left/right brain if you will (a dialectical method). What we must avoid is heavy handed bureaucracy and stifling of creativity by forcing designers to march lockstep step after step, all mandatory, all documented and codified, etc. Else it becomes a crutch and kills inventive spirit, imho…

I’ll be back at SJSU this fall teaching an evening course on the fundamentals of interaction design for undergrad ID majors, which should be quite fun! (and tiring too…who knew teaching was so much work! But very enjoyable) I learned a ton on my first go at it last fall and have thus been re-tooling the syllabus accordingly, front-loading the theoretical content and focusing the rest of the semester on hands-on projects, connecting back to the earlier concepts. One major change is that I will be not doing one central monolithic project for all the students… instead I will have a different approach that enables greater variety of solutions and more collaboration across teams. Plus I’ll be having a few guest lectures from folks like Andrei, Cordell, and some others in the valley to provide richer/diverse perspectives on design issues like digital craft, rapid prototyping, and strategic product development.

From the syllabus introductory paragraph:

The central theme of the course is that design is a human-centric problem solving activity,
based upon the ideas of conversation and rhetoric towards achieving simple, focused, elegant solutions. Each week we will delve deeper into what this means in terms of visual design, digital interaction/behaviors, and language/content.

By the end of the semester, students will understand the overall design process, address typical interaction design problems/issues, and be able to generate compelling solutions in a variety of forms: sketches, mock-ups, and prototypes (a movie, a click-through, or more advanced per student skills). Students will also develop a basis for how to critique designs and present themselves effectively.

As you can deduce, my approach to teaching this subject is heavily influenced by my education at CMU, particularly the humanist/rhetorical approach to design as argument, informed by Dick Buchanan’s ideas. This might be a bit heavy for undergrad students but I hope to at least seed the ideas, which may come to fruition later on in their careers. They may not truly get it right away, but surely they will notice the value of the approach soon enough with the projects and critiques I’ll be giving them ;-) Either way, I look forward to advancing such ideas and helping educate another group of young designers…